Summary
TheBorderlandsmovie is a generational failure. Before it even launched, itstruggled to sell tickets, and it went on to bomb critically,launching to a zero percent on Rotten Tomatoes, and commercially, makingaround $30 million of its $150 million budget back. The movieearned Jack Black a Razzie nominationfor Worst Supporting Actor, but somehow, itdidn’t end up in Metacritic’s ‘Ten Worst Video Game Adaptations Of All Time" list.
Now, more than six months after its disastrous launch, director Eli Roth has been reflecting on why the movie went so badly, blaming both COVID and Zoom Calls for its failure.
Borderlands Director Cites COVID As The Main Reason The Movie Flopped
The Borderlands movie was doomed from the start. It took over a decade from start to finish, faced multiple script re-writes, and lost multiple directors along the way. This meant it fell on the lap of Eli Roth, who has been looking back on what went wrong.
Roth had previously said he “could write a book” on what went wrong with the movie, hinting that COVID was one of the main factors, but the director has now gone into more detail on the trials and tribulations he faced when creating it.
“I think none of us, none of us anticipated how complicated things were gonna be with COVID,” Roth toldThe Townpodcast (ViaPC Gamer). “Not just in terms of what we’re shooting, but then you have to do pick-up shots or reshoots and you have six people that are all on different sets and every one of those sets is getting shut down because the cities have opened up, and now there’s a COVID outbreak and it was just like… we couldn’t prep in a room together, I couldn’t be with my stunt people, I couldn’t do pre-vis, everyone’s spread all over the place. You can’t prep a movie on that scale over Zoom, and I think we all thought we could pull it off, and we got our a**es handed to us a bit.”
You can’t prep a movie on that scale over Zoom, and I think we all thought we could pull it off, and we got our a**es handed to us a bit.
During the discussion, Roth also discussed how, despite directing the movie, he didn’t have the final cut of, with Deadpool’s Tim Miller stepping in as Roth moved onto his next project, Thanksgiving. He told The Town, “am I at the point of my career where I’m going to sit down to watch my own movie that says I wrote and directed it, and I really genuinely don’t know what’s going to happen?”
